


o heart's desire

by skazka



Category: Leopold and Loeb RPF
Genre: Crueltide, Ghosts, M/M, Vignettes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-22
Updated: 2014-12-22
Packaged: 2018-03-02 22:07:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2827742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skazka/pseuds/skazka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For Richard it will always be at the start of things, and for Nathan it will always be too late.</p>
            </blockquote>





	o heart's desire

**Author's Note:**

  * For [havisham](https://archiveofourown.org/users/havisham/gifts).



> There was a Door to which I found no Key:  
>  There was a Veil past which I could not see:  
>  Some little Talk awhile of **me** and **thee**  
>  There seemed—and then no more of **thee** and **me**.

*

**1921**

They make a deal for the first time on the train back to school, when they haven't known each other very long at all. It must have been a gamble, but it didn't feel like one; Nathan is persuasive and Richard is ready to be persuaded. After, on the street outside the station, Richard is in high spirits; he whistles at girls, smiles at strangers. Nathan is as sullen as ever as soon as they're in the open, as sullen as when they left, as if it hadn't happened at all. He's pale and folded-up. 

"Don't look so wound-up, people'll think you're up to something." Richard scuffs him on the shoulder, and Nathan startles like he'd struck him. 

"How _should_ I look, exactly?" He digs deeper into his coat, like he's trying to hide a shudder of something unspeakable, and he looks so much like a little old man that Richard could laugh, though he does not. 

"Like you're stretching your legs with one of your pals, for Christ's sake. Cool down a little; people would think you were going to your own funeral."

Richard tries to put his arm around him and Babe allows it, but he's queerly stiff beside him, whether that's cowardice or pride he can't tell. He stands up a little straighter, though, and martials his odd face for confidence if not joy. 

Later it occurs to him as something really simple: Nathan expects him to feel disgust, and he does not. He expects him to be angry with him for what they've done, and he is not, at least not yet. Maybe he's tried this on other boys and they've rebuffed him -- Richard tries to think of anyone else they know who'd have been close enough to approach, and there's no one at all. There's only himself. 

It seems right and fit, to carry on as if it hasn't happened, but Richard doesn't do that either. They have a late breakfast together when they get back, together with a couple classmates and their pretty sisters. At one point Richard reaches for his glass and the backs of two fingers brush Nathan's wrist. Nathan raises his head, affronted, but someone's just called Richard by name and he's turned away, not thinking of him; he is smiling.

(Nathan follows him to Michigan; he would follow him anywhere.)

*

**1923**

They are studying together and Richard is drunk again; he'd hoped it would bring him up, but he's just unsteady and sick and full of rattling energy. All night he's been itching to do something besides this, any old thing to take off that dizzy edge -- to drive too fast and laugh too loud and frighten the girls. He could go out, if Babe weren't here, folded up in a sulk with a heap of books -- surely he has his own kind to study with, other diligent well-bred Jewish boys cursed with deep awkwardness -- and if Babe weren't apt to resent anyone else he went out on the town with. And he can hardly take Nathan along with him; there's hardly any overlap between his daylit life, shared with his fraternity brothers and his professors and a dozen surnameless girls, and the narrow dark heart of what he shares with Nathan alone. Sometimes it delights him, sometimes he's sick of it, but he's never frightened, never. 

Nothing seems of any use. He'll go forth laughing and do whatever seems fit, but at the end of the night Nathan will want what he always wants. They're both boys. They're just boys. 

Dick fumbles forth a new cigarette and lights it; Nathan watches him, like he watches him count cards with the older boys for money and cigarettes. He wants to learn, when method isn't enough, and he watches his hands. 

(Something the papers will never quite capture, no photograph, no diagram of his sensuous lips and prideful glands and criminally sensitive brow, is Nathan's eyes: soft eyes in a lively too-mobile face -- like a girl's eyes. They're gray; in photographs they look dark.) 

Later, Nathan will fumble at him from underneath and Richard will bite him on the throat. He must have read about it in a book somewhere and it excites him terribly, allowing Richard to be cruel. They will lie together like conspirators and talk of nothing but theft and rape. What Nathan wants out of this is never hard to give him -- what is it to him, in the dark, if it's Richard's hands on his throat or Nathan between his legs, if his hands are tied or he hits him with a belt a little? It costs him nothing and wins him plenty, at first it had been merely reckless fun and now it is intoxicating. It doesn't matter who's doing what -- it gets him out of his head, and he's the one allowing it, permitting what another man would not, would never. They're not like other men. There is something uneasy about it all, but loving Nathan is the simplest thing he's ever done. 

This, too, is criminal, and it beats stealing cars and breaking windows. There's less mess.

**

**1936**

At Statesville, afterward, they leave Nathan with the body for a while -- not alone, but it doesn't matter, it has only ever been the two of them. What they've let him have isn't Dick any more, only an inert stinking thing with a heavy head, and any shade of life is fast leaving it. Nathan has been permitted to watch this happen, as some special privilege for good behavior, some manner of cure. And this is his punishment, too -- for letting it happen -- he should have at least done something, he should have paid the right man off or overcome his own trepidation and disgust. It should never have been Dick in the first place, he was stronger and more likeable, more fit to live. It should have been him -- it should always have been him, the weaker and more contemptible of the two. He'd have let it happen, even. 

It's on Nathan to make things as decent as he can, after the doctor and before the undertaker. He doesn't know what he expected Dick to look like in death -- to look the way he did six hours ago and still alive, the way he had a week ago, or the way he had at Joliet, grim and quiet. Death has made him something cumbersome and terrible -- his slit throat like a naked mouth, barred with coarse sutures, the crooks of his fingers cut open from grabbing at the blade. His back and shoulders took the brunt of the injury, it makes Nathan sick to see him laid out and to know -- to read every sign like a letter, every blow and how he'd fallen. There's no way to make this decent. 

The wounds rinse white, the rag in his hand is heavy with blood. They'll have to burn it, Nathan supposes.

*

**1965**

All things considered, he is doing admirably well. He teaches at the university here, he has gainful employment, he has time in which to read and write and to go birding if he likes. He is well-liked here, even loved, by simple decent people. He has tasted of perfect kindness, he has escaped, he has survived. There is never a morning when he wakes up without thinking that all things considered he'd rather be dead. This half-life is what he's striven for, and he'll be striving for the rest of his life to keep it. He's done well and put himself right, but he is impossibly tired with it all, tired of the labor of being good and no longer capable of anything else. 

His wife is still asleep; outside the sky has scarcely begun to lighten, and no birds sing. He shaves with steady hands; his razor only pauses once against his flabby throat, as it often does. 

He pauses in the hallway afterward -- he couldn't say why, to pay his respects maybe, or an uncertainty about whether he ought to go back and try again. Loeb's photograph is where it always is, and Loeb is there as well. 

The boy he's loved for forty-five years is there again, like a monument to incongruity: a young man in an old man's shabby little house, standing beside his own photograph and careless of the resemblance. Real as life, or realer; in the popular imagination he'll always be this way, sleek and golden, not a cold-eyed man of thirty in a denim uniform. 

"Don't be so stupid," he says, like he knows -- and it's not Dick the way he was, restrained and sullen, but Dick the way he had been. His hands are in his pockets, his wristwatch is too loose on his wrist, his slim shoulders are cocked a little in a shrug. "What'll that fix?" 

He twists at his watch band with two long fingers. Nathan watches his hands. 

This isn't what he wants to be -- still tangled up in him, still with the past adhering to him like a bad name. There's not a day where he doesn't think of what he's done, that Clarence Darrow is dead and cannot argue for his case, that Bobby Franks is dead and no amount of charity will revive him -- there's not a day when he doesn't call to mind that Richard Loeb is dead, by banal prison-yard misadventure, and it's him who made it out and will grow bald and gray and nearly respectable. It's him who'll testify for the rest of time; he'll tell and retell it to himself, build it into something he can nearly stomach looking at. 

Nathan declines to speak to it, to him. This is nothing but a recurring trick of the mind, an awful trick and not even an uncommon one. He will not dignify this with a name. He's given up all other fantasies as a matter of course, even the common kind that he supposes everyone must engage in to some degree -- constructing a future, deliberating upon a goal, straying sideways to another place or another persona. These days, he tries not to look back at all; he's told his version of how it went, and he'll stand by it. 

"You deserve this, Babe. Don't you think you've done enough? You ought to settle in," Richard says, "and enjoy it while you can. Didn't you say you wanted to settle down?" 

When has Dick's advice ever done him any good? Nathan turns his head and looks away.

*

**Author's Note:**

> This totally falls through on the plot front due to length and for that I apologize. It's also been a while since I was deeply involved in researching this case, so I apologize for any factual issues there may be as well. 
> 
> The epigraph is taken from the Fitzgerald translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which Darrow quoted from a couple times during the course of the boys' trial.


End file.
